This is the final decade
Final Decade is a collective ten-year-long scheme. We examine the decade-long window of opportunity to prevent the future and stabilize Earth’s biosphere, the zone of all known life.
Issue 00 laid out the Plan: Final Decade exists for critical thought to keep life alive in a weirding climate. We also built a proto-community and launched an irl/url media experiment: a set of club-ready tees with a QR-code on the back linking to the Plan.
But master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. Things are going to get weird, and deciphering this weirdness requires new means.
We are building new community foundations for exploring existential dread and alternate climate discourse. Final Decade will take a form of a DAO, or more specifically a decentralized media organization.
Survival is our mission
The mission of Final Decade DAO is common survival: to help keep life alive on Earth — or to divert from the ”highway to climate hell”, as the U.N. Secretary-General recently framed our future.
Today, meaningful ecological politics is not about “saving the planet” or “solving the climate crisis”.
A fresher, more realistic take is about limiting how many people will die, how many are displaced, how many are distressed, how many species will vanish, and how vast will the destruction of planetary liveability become.
Lore is our message
We publish lore for earthly survival: new ideas, concepts, theories, and thoughts for keeping life alive in a weirding climate.
Imagining and creating more hopeful futures is an act of worldbuilding: an active collective process of setting up new shared social worlds in different material contexts. The social worlds are essentially collections of social fictions: cultural, economic, societal, political, and religious belief systems, shared meanings, and mutual values that shape how we think and behave.
We urgently need more engaging social fictions that progressively deal with climate destabilization, looming loss of life, and common survival instead of collective demise.
Lore is a crucial tool for this task. In the web3 setting, lore refers to a narrative path for developing new social fictions through ideas, memes, stories, and art. It is also a key approach for communities and organizations to manage their own social realities.
The lore of Final Decade can be seen as a shared intelligence of common survival that emerges from the community: Lore that is articulated as narrative media, published as ‘issues’, shared through several channels, and describing behaviors and rituals to prevent the grim future.
DAO is our medium
The most inspiring contemporary technologies for worldbuilding and lorecraft are decentralized and tokenized organizations, or DAOs.
These progressively self-managed, token-coordinated and collectively-governed communities are often themselves a result of a type of worldbuilding and lorecrafting. But DAOs can also be powerful social devices for developing and spreading new social fictions beyond their own communities to broader audiences.
Final Decade DAO takes the shape of a decentralized media organization (or a DAMN, a decentralized autonomous media network), exploring the next evolution of media production. The DAO will be owned by our community, incentivized to be valuable for our participants, and sharply focused on creating and distributing content around our mission.
Our initial model is to publish thematic digital issues that come with digital collectibles. We believe that the future of media is about meaningful works of art (such as articles, novels, images, videos, films, etc.) that provide multiple ways for people to engage with them, share them, own them, and collect them or parts of them.
If we succeed, we envision we can become an impresario that builds conditions for new lore and rituals to emerge, across the entangled spheres of memefied media, decentralized culture and destabilizing climate.